Perceived Railway Infrastructure Quality and Safety and Sustainable Tourism Intentions in Montenegro: Evidence from a Structural Equation Model of Rail Travellers

Railways are the backbone of low-carbon tourism mobility, yet in peripheral European destinations, the condition and safety record of the network often lag behind visitors’ expectations. This study examines how the perceived quality and safety of railway infrastructure shape sustainable tourism development in Montenegro, whose railway network comprises 250 km of open-line track—dominated by the mountainous Vrbnica–Bar section of the Belgrade–Bar line—and is the only corridor linking the saturated Adriatic coast with the under-visited north. Drawing on the transport–tourism nexus, service-quality theory and the expectancy–disconfirmation paradigm, we model infrastructure quality, perceived safety, service reliability and rail-based accessibility as antecedents of satisfaction with the rail experience, which in turn is related to sustainable tourism behavioural intentions directly and, through the perceived contribution of rail, to sustainable destination development. The model was tested with covariance-based structural equation modelling on an intercept survey of 487 rail travellers (summer 2025), complemented by an importance–performance analysis of twelve attributes and by a multigroup comparison of regional and other international visitors for which measurement invariance was established. All ten hypothesised paths were supported: infrastructure quality was the strongest correlate of perceived safety (β = 0.58; R2 = 0.34); reliability, quality, safety and accessibility explained 58% of the variance in satisfaction; and satisfaction, safety and the perceived sustainability contribution explained 59% of the variance in intentions, with the entirely indirect effect of infrastructure quality on intentions (0.45) estimated within the latent model by bootstrap. In a metric-invariant two-group model, perceived safety weighed more heavily on the intentions of visitors from outside the region and satisfaction on those of regional visitors. Because the design is cross-sectional and based on self-reports, the results describe associations consistent with the hypothesised ordering rather than demonstrated causal effects. Track condition, punctuality and journey time fall in the “concentrate here” quadrant. The findings link the EU-accession agenda on railway safety and interoperability to the destination goal of dispersing tourism flows, and offer prioritisation guidance for the rehabilitation of the Vrbnica–Bar line and the renewal of the passenger fleet.